Industrial olefin/paraffin separations heavily rely upon energy-intensive cryogenic distillation-based techno-logies, which represent a class of the most important and also the most costly processes in the chemical industry.
Adsorptive separation is widely considered as a more energy- and cost-efficient alternative. The structures and properties of the adsorbent materials often dictate the separation mechanisms that apply: molecular sieving or steric size exclusion, equilibrium- or kinetics-based separation. While most adsorbents (exclusively zeolites or amorphous adsorbents) studied for olefin/paraffin separations achieve such separations by their preferential equilibrated uptake of one component versus the other or by size exclusion, there are a limited number of cases where the separations are accomplished by differences in the diffusion rates of the adsorbates (olefin and paraffin) into and out of the adsorbents.
Accordingly, there is a need for additional compounds and methods useful for gas separation.